Throughout metropolitan areas, multiple business directories, normally published by different publishers and commonly known as “yellow pages” books, compete for the business of the various advertisers in the area. The competing yellow pages books generally have different, but overlapping geographic coverages. In other words, in a given metropolitan area, various yellow pages books are distributed to different, overlapping subsets of the entire metropolitan area. For example, one yellow pages book may be distributed to suburbs A, B, and C, whereas a different yellow pages book may be distributed to suburbs B, C, D, and E. It is common that the various suburbs have different demographic characteristics in terms of business activity, consumer population, aggregate household income, and the like.
Businesses that advertise in yellow pages books tend to choose from the multiple competing yellow pages books, or at least allocate different levels of advertising dollars to the various competing books. Businesses generally desire to be listed in yellow pages books that are distributed to the households that immediately surround it. However, there may be multiple books that meet that criteria, each with a somewhat different coverage. So, businesses tend to either choose one of the books or allocate different levels of advertising dollars among the books covering its area. Furthermore, businesses may desire to place yellow pages advertisements that reach more distant geographic areas within the same general metropolitan area. Similarly, some geographic areas are highly desirable in which to place advertisements, usually because of the particular demographics of that area. As a result, the specific geographic coverage of a yellow pages book (i.e., households to which a book is distributed) is important to the amount of advertising revenue that the book attracts, and thus, the ultimate financial success of that book.
Typically, one of the first steps in setting the scope of a new yellow pages book involves hiring a market research firm to survey the marketplace, provide data and to make predictions relating to the potential derivable advertising revenue and market share of a proposed yellow pages book. The market research process is typically long and expensive, and includes implementing consumer and business surveys that are custom-designed for each metropolitan area. The survey results must be analyzed by market research professionals to provide market share predictions. The entire market research process typically takes several months to complete. Further, because the market research process is specific to each individual metropolitan area, the entire market research process must be started from scratch each time a publisher designs a new book in a different metropolitan area. Even after the market research is complete, providing feedback for books of various coverages requires several steps and is not instantaneous. As a result, the process of analyzing several proposed books of varying coverages to determine which coverage provides the greatest expected advertising revenue can be an arduous one.
Therefore, a need exists for an improved method of predicting expected revenue generation of yellow pages books having certain geographic coverages.